say hi to_ Casa Perfect

The Future Perfect has long been a champion of some of the most innovative contemporary designers and artists coveted by interior designers and collectors in the US and around the world. The company, under the direction of founder David Alhadeff, has continued to evolve and elevate their product offering, moving the store in 2009 from Brooklyn to more of a gallery model in Manhattan, and adding a San Francisco location in 2013.

As an interior designer and general design junkie, I was thrilled to learn that The Future Perfect decided to bring their incredible design presence to the City of Angels. For the LA outpost, Alhadeff opted to try a different model to address both the changing landscape of high end retail as well as the needs of the Los Angeles design community.

The results are stunning. Situated in a picture-perfect Los Angeles midcentury modern house in the Hollywood Hills, Casa Perfect offers designers and clients the opportunity to view a rotating collection of expertly curated furniture, lighting and decorative arts in a dream-like setting. I had the great pleasure of sitting down with the Future Perfect founder David Alhadeff to learn more about what prompted the move to LA as well as his vision for Casa Perfect.

cityLos Angeles

dateApril 3, 2017

| Leah | What made you decide to bring The Future Perfect to Los Angeles?

| David | It was equal parts personal interest and business. I really love it here. I did a project in 2006 at Tenoversix so I tasted the waters of Los Angeles and working here was great. Even in the ten year period since 2006, we've built an interesting selection of product that can't be found anywhere else and there's something very unique about what we're doing. We service the LA market, but I looked at the way we were servicing this market and thought there was an opportunity to do more business in LA. The reality is that even though we probably all browse online, in our industry we need a place to physically see product, to show our clients and offer an experiential visit and I felt like LA made a perfect third location for us.

| Leah | Why did you opt to go for a living design gallery rather than a more traditional showroom for your LA outpost?

| David | The house, for me, was less about being a house and more about doing something completely non-traditional. The only thing I knew in coming to LA was that I wasn't going to do traditional retail. The reason for that is, even on the high street, shopping in LA is always a destination experience. There's something about how I relate to retail in Los Angeles that led me to believe that if we did something here, we would do it as a very private experience. This is for two reasons, one is that the nature of shopping here is destination focused and the second is that there is a whole set of people here who want a discreet shopping experience and find value in that.

| Leah | When looking for spaces in Los Angeles, was there a particular architectural style you were aiming for?

| David | The two styles I was looking for were either classic midcentury or Spanish-style. I wanted to do something that felt very typically LA and I wanted the architecture to have a sense of importance to it. It was less important to me that the architect was necessarily named, but I wanted the feeling of the architecture to be very typically LA and I wanted to evoke that sense from the moment you walked into the house.

| Leah | This model of showcasing designers and artists in a residence differs from your Manhattan and San Francisco locations - do you feel that the Los Angeles design community needed a different approach or did you have other goals in mind when crafting your vision for Casa Perfect?

| David | I think that retail is in flux right now and I think the importance of the high street is changing. Casa Perfect is an answer we developed to respond to the changing model of retail.

| Leah | Do you plan on rotating the items gallery on a regular basis? What other plans do you have for Casa Perfect over the course of the next year?

| David | We already have been rotating pieces as things have been selling. We set up the house to have more of a gallery format presence, we intentionally did not set it up as rooms. A lot of the LA shopping experience is that items are memoed out, which is different from our New York store, but I knew that we were going to have to answer to that so we set the house up in such a way that we could very easily rotate and transition pieces in and out very quickly. In addition, we also will program the space with special shows and curations that are more specific than what we're showing now.

| Leah | How did you decide what to show at Casa Perfect?

| David | I wanted to bring to Los Angeles a cross section of our program. We have three categories we sell from, all of them are contemporary. The first is our gallery program which is limited edition and one of a kind pieces that we've collaborated with designers on that are exclusive to the Future Perfect. The second part of our program are pieces in contemporary production that we exclusively represent in the market, and the third part is the contemporary production that we work with in a more general way. What you see in the house are highlights of all three of those categories in a mix, which was very unique for this location. In New York, if we show some of our gallery program work, we show it in a very strict, formatted way. To bring a piece out and break it up from it's collection was unusual and I like it. I went back to New York and we immediately reformatted the gallery there, and the current space in New York is a bit of a reflection of what we're doing here.

| Leah | How do you find new talent to showcase at the Future Perfect?

| David | It's a small world that we live and work in, it's very much friend of a friend in a lot of ways. In addition, we do have a submissions button on our website and we invite people to submit their work that way. We get a lot of submissions and I would say it has been successful, we have definitely found people through that channel. The third part would be Instagram.

| Leah | Could you foresee having a permanent Future Perfect location in Los Angeles?

| David | This is a permanent location. Casa Perfect may or may not last for longer than a year, but the Future Perfect will be in LA. This was something different for us, so there was a question mark here which was "will it work?" and I can say that it is working.

All photos by Lauren Coleman

Casa PerfectWest HollywoodLos Angeles, CA

By Appointment Only.(323) 202-2025

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